Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-01
Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...
Walking downtown for my Friday shopping, I get stuck behind a young girl and an older woman.
At first, I think that the woman might be having trouble walking. I quickly see that she is merely irritated. The girl, on the other hand, is walking in a very specific pattern with respect to the changes in color of the strips of bricks on that particular sidewalk. I sometimes do that, too, but only if no one is behind me.
Realizing that, I also slow down and enjoy her mathematical dance. I think of doing it behind her, but that might just look too weird. Watching her, I imagine that I have stepped into a Meredith Monk video.
A crowd has gathered outside the shop next to the chicken joint. It briefly was a sushi bar. Elegant curtains now cover the inside of the front window. Gold text in something like Times Roman reads "Pilates." There's another word in smaller type below it. The heads of the crowd block some letters. I can't tell what it says.
I buy some new socks at a shoe store a few doors down. I do most of it in Hebrew, though the cashier switches to English when I slip up. He asks me the English word for "receipt" as he hands me mine. I pronounce it carefully for him. English spells it strangely. The Hebrew word for "receipt" is kabbalah. It's also the word for the main strain of Jewish mysticism. That makes sense. In both cases, it means "that which is received."
I ask the owner of the international foods store if they carry mole sauce. "The mole sauce is missing," he replies in English. "But do not give up hope. The mole sauce someday will return."
The aisles of the supermarket are crowded. I have to move carefully as I select onions from a produce bin. A young man is walking past me, holding two paper cups of hot tea with mint leaves floating in them.
Our mayor has lost the election.1 The official count: in this city of about one hundred thousand people, he came up 299 votes short.
The difference from the last election, five years ago, seems to be a new, very ritzy neighborhood2 of tall apartment towers, a "city within the city"3 that has sprung up since then.
I've never been there. No bus lines appear to go into it, though there's one bus stop at the edge. The neighborhood's near the train station, but it's a long, circuitous walk to it from there. A video from last year claims that it's about a third of a mile from the area where many offices are, but close to two miles if you walk. 4
The newly elected mayor and his advocates appear to cater to young, rich, gas-guzzling, anti-religious newcomers who don't have a sense of the city as a whole. I hope our side of town doesn't suffer as a result.
The House of a Hundred Grandmothers has had a good relationship with the current administration. That's important, since it's owned by the city. I hope that they, too, don't get caught in the changeover. From what I can see, the new administration seems less attuned to the needs of an older, less mobile, generally less wealthy community that reflects the city's balance of the religious and non-religious.
Kiddush at the House tonight sounds almost rowdy. There are a few new people. Several voices are out of sync with the others and with my relative who is leading it. This will either sort itself out or become a new normal that people will come to accept as the sound of the community.
The walk home is treacherous. None of the streetlights in the park are working. I try to navigate by memory in the dark. After all, I have walked this path hundreds of times.
When I trip over the raised brick edge of a triangle of grass, I finally turn the flashlight on my phone on. Maneuvering in the dark wouldn't have worked. Things are not where I thought they were. Steps are nearer or farther away. The path takes turns that I don't recall. I've been trusting my eyes in the moment, but haven't built the muscle memory needed to walk without looking.
I guess I'm not religious enough to trust that I have, as the psalm says, a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.5 All things considered, my faith is in my flashlight.
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You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.
The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me at that Las Vegas address, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)
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L'hitraot.